The weekend’s Premier League games saw yet more controversy. Diving players, racist taunts, pitch invasions and a bloodied Rio Ferdinand
reeling from a missile impact which, had it landed a centimetre below the
eyebrow it struck, could well have blinded him. Yet this type of behaviour is nothing
new. Fully four years before the birth
of Ferdinand, on 24th August 1974, at the rear of Blackpool Football
Club’s Spion Kop, a young man named Kevin Olsson was stabbed in the stomach
during an altercation with rival fans.
As the seventeen year old lay bleeding on the stepped terraces amongst
the discarded pie wrappers, glowing cigarette butts and freshly expelled urine,
he might briefly have wondered what would become of the game that he
followed.
Kevin, you were the first person to be murdered inside a British football ground. And I’m sorry to have to report that, along with
you, football died that day in 1974.
Since that time, our
national game has flattered to deceive with successive makeovers designed to
make it more palatable and appealing to successive generations. Yet the game has been so full of short-term
greed and lacking in long-term visionaries that it has consistently failed to
right its wrongs. As a leopard never
changes its spots, this animal will always revert to its natural state – a wild
and ugly beast that symbolises all that is wrong in our spoiled and petulant
society. A game riddled with racism
amongst many of its supporters, a preternatural propensity to cheat amongst its
players and a singular lack of respect for authority from significant sections
of the baying masses that gather to participate and support at almost every
level of its existence.
Disasters of every type
have come and gone since Kevin Olsson’s death.
At Hillsborough and Bradford, hundreds perished in terrible tragedies at
substandard stadia where supporters were treated like cattle. The Taylor Report that followed
revolutionised ground safety with fans ensconced in all-seater comfort within brand
new hospitality-suited pleasure domes. For
a short while, it seemed as if progress was being made.
An Australian media mogul named
Rupert decided football was the sport on which he would build his television
empire and with that decision came an injection of previously undreamed of
wealth. Soon, clubs were fighting for
their share of the millions in a spectacular and unseemly display of
greed. The Football League was
fragmented, with the FA Premier League formed to house the elite. Football once again demonstrated an all too
familiar ability to reflect the society it serves to entertain. The rich would get richer, the poor could
take their chances.
Murdoch’s millions inflated
player salaries to ludicrous levels, with clubs living wildly beyond their
means. In the past twenty years, the
average national UK wage has risen by 186%.
The average wage of a UK footballer has risen by over 1,500%. Top players earn more than £1 million per
month and the wage bill alone of several clubs outstrips their total
turnover. Yet this profligacy and
excess, this mercenary milking of a club’s resources has become the norm. “Who can blame him”, are the words most often
heard when yet another player jumps ship to secure a further ten grand a month
on an already unimaginable salary. And
that is symptomatic of the problem.
There is no blame in football, simply a resigned shrug and a bow to what
is perceived as market forces. The last
time we had such a collective bout of sticking our heads in the sand to avoid
confronting such a problem, the banks crashed around us and the repercussions
swept around the world like a giant tsunami.
Whilst the demise of football as we know it will never be as
cataclysmic, it will surely come unless we acknowledge that some form of root
and branch review of the way the game conducts itself is required.
The sport has become a
plaything of the rich and famous, stripping once local clubs of their
identities as more and more overpaid outsiders (from within and without the UK)
are parachuted in to clubs - clubs that once relied on talent scouted from
within thirty miles of their grounds – to chase yet more financial rewards in
the form of European competition. The
end result has been to leave many of those who follow their team to fashion a
revised identity through a reversion to obscene chanting, racist gestures and random,
missile-throwing, violence.
For, if it is about
nothing else, football is about identity.
It is a raw, tribal force – a gathering of young men to prove their
virility and manhood. It is about
geography, a kind of sawn-off nationalism that demands respect for, and defence
of, one’s ‘turf’ - both on and off the
field of play. That’s all well and good
in modern times as long as that with it comes an understanding of the role of
our own and other communities within a broader society. But, as a moral beacon to those following,
football’s light is barely a flickering Swan Vesta. The financial stakes have relentlessly
increased and the rewards have become too great for those participating to
ignore. Cheating has become the
norm. Cheating off the pitch by way of running
companies based almost entirely on debt or the ‘false’ income of sugar daddy
owners. Cheating on the pitch by way of
diving, referee abuse, feigning injury, the wagging of imaginary cards and all
manner of other, so called ‘professional’ actions. How surprised should we be then, that many fans,
like children spoiled by indulgent parents with no sense of fiscal value, have
become recalcitrant and unpleasant, unable to contain the bile and vitriol that
comfy seating and stainless steel pie ovens have carefully plastered over for
the past two decades.
Behind the family friendly
façade of Sunday afternoon kick-offs and worldwide television audiences lies a
world of avarice, fiscal irresponsibility and a lack of respect and
authority. The lunatics, on and off the
pitch, are firmly in charge of the asylum.
The good and decent majority are, once again, silent.
I suspect, if Kevin Olsson
were alive today and had been able to see the blood flowing down Rio
Ferdinand’s face, he might have opined that the game that exists as we go into
2013 is, despite its shiny packaging, in many ways more cynical, more
unpleasant and more deeply rooted in the unedifying values of greed, desperation
and a desire to win at all costs than the one he so tragically left behind on
the concrete of the Blackpool kop on that warm and balmy August day in 1974.
